Fake news sites intended as satirical amusement have been around for a while. The Onion is a well-known example. Its stories have sometimes been cited or recycled as serious news, however, as in the 2012 case of a conservative congressman who posted a story about an $8-billion Planned Parenthood "Abortionplex" on his Facebook page
The Onion's Latin motto, "Tu stultus es," simply translates to "You are stupid."
Traditional news sources do report highly inaccurate or even wholly false stories on occasion. Stephen Glass was an up-and-coming journalist with The New Republic, a well-established liberal magazine, who fabricated dozens of stories in the mid-1990s. Despite going to some length to cover his tracks, including creating a bogus (but rudimentary) website for a fictional software company in one of his stories and recruiting his brother to impersonate a source, he was eventually exposed and fired after an investigation by a suspicious rival publication, Forbes, and Glass' own editor, Chuck Lane.
Buzz Bissinger of Vanity Fair wrote about this episode in a 1998 article, "Shattered Glass," which became the basis of a 2003 film starring Hayden Christensen in the title role. Glass operated in an era when searching for information on the Web was perhaps not as fluid as it is today, but his story remains an important reminder that information (especially of the sensational, crowd-pleasing variety) that cannot be verified or corroborated using other sources should be treated with skepticism.
Fake news does not represent new ideas, merely new methods. It is closely related to the much older practices of propaganda, yellow journalism, and tabloid journalism. What all these practices have in common is that they distort fact, or deal in outright falsehoods, to achieve an emotional effect, rather than to inform or educate. The motives behind them may range considerably, though. These phenomena fall under the blanket term of "disinformation."
Propaganda
There are abundant examples of propaganda use throughout history. Below are a few examples:
From left to right: French WWI propaganda, American WWII propaganda, American anti-Catholic propaganda. All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Yellow Journalism
Yellow journalism is a term used to refer to unethical, sensationalistic reporting. Historically, it has most often been applied to the practices of William Randolph Hearst's and (ironically, given that his name has become synonymous with excellence in journalism) Joseph Pulitzer's competing New York-based newspaper empires in the 1890s, especially leading up to the 1898 Spanish-American War (S. Kobre, "The Yellow Press and Gilded Age Journalism," 1964).
Tabloid Journalism
Tabloid journalism is a term more familiar to most Americans. It is similar to yellow journalism; perhaps the main difference is that it is less likely to focus on major news stories and more likely to feature headlines on celebrity gossip and purported bizarre occurrences. A prominent (if extreme) example is The National Enquirer:
Image originally found here.
A tactic that complicates the fake news issue even further is the creation of "deep fakes." This is the use of motion capture and emerging video technology to create very realistic simulations of real people saying or doing bogus things. Deep fakes can be virtually impossible to spot by sight alone.
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